Echoes of Iraq rise in Syria debate

Republican leadership supports Obama, but vote still uncertain

New York Times

New York Times

Published 10:59 pm, Tuesday, September 3, 2013

Secretary of State John Kerry is flanked by Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as they testify about Syria before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, at the Capitol in Washington, Sept. 3, 2013. Speaker John Boehner on Tuesday said he would support President Barack ObamaOs Ocall to action,O a crucial endorsement that could help the president make inroads with House Republicans. (Doug Mills/The New York Times) ORG XMIT: XNYT92

Secretary of State John Kerry is flanked by Defense Secretary Chuck...

President Barack Obama won the support on Tuesday of Republican and Democratic leaders in the House for an attack on Syria, giving him a foundation to win broader approval for military action from a Congress that still harbors deep reservations.

Speaker John Boehner, who with other congressional leaders met Obama in the Oval Office, said afterward that he would "support the president's call to action," an endorsement quickly echoed by the House majority leader, Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia.

Uncertainties abound, particularly in the House, where the imprimatur of the Republican leadership does not guarantee approval by rebellious rank and file, and where vocal factions in both parties are opposed to anything that could entangle the nation in another messy conflict in the Middle East.

Still, the expressions of support from top Republicans who rarely agree with Obama on anything suggest the White House may be on firmer footing than seemed the case on Saturday, when the president abruptly halted his plans for action in the face of growing protests from Congress.

On Tuesday evening, Democrats and Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee agreed on a resolution that would give Obama authority to carry out a strike against Syria, for a period of 60 days, with one 30-day extension.

Shortly after that, Obama left for Sweden and Russia, where he will try to shore up an international coalition to punish Syria for a chemical weapons attack and will probably encounter some of the same debates that are cleaving the Capitol.

Before his departure, the White House intensified what has become the most extraordinary lobbying campaign of Obama's presidency as it deployed members of his war council and enlisted political alumni of his 2008 campaign to press the argument with the public.

"This is not the time for armchair isolationism," said Secretary of State John Kerry, who answered sharp questions and defended the administration's strategy for Syria in nearly four hours of sometimes sharp exchanges before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

"We were here for that vote," Kerry said. "We voted. So we are especially sensitive — Chuck and I — to never again asking any member of Congress to take a vote on faulty intelligence. And that is why our intelligence community has scrubbed and rescrubbed the evidence."

Kerry said the intelligence proved that the "Assad regime prepared for this attack, issued instructions to prepare for this attack, warned its own forces to use gas masks," and the intelligence included "physical evidence of where the rockets came from and when."

Hagel, who, like Kerry, is a veteran of the Vietnam War, used another argument used by previous administrations: a warning that authoritarian governments with arsenals of unconventional weapons could transfer them to terrorist groups.

Casting the issue as one of self-defense, the defense secretary also underscored the threat to U.S. military personnel across the region if chemical weapons proliferated out of Syria. He said other dictators might be emboldened if the U.S. did not punish the Assad government.

"The use of chemical weapons in Syria is not only an assault on humanity," Hagel said. "It is a serious threat to America's national security interests and those of our closest allies."

The calendar is Obama's enemy: Many members from both parties are still back in their districts hearing from constituents, and the feedback, based on numerous interviews, is overwhelmingly negative.